A curious episode occurs in the aftermath of the battle in which the
protagonist of Coriolanus secures for himself the name from which
the play itself derives its title. It is an incident which, although of no great
importance in itself, receives sufficient emphasis as to stand out in suggestive
relief from its immediate dramatic context, hinting at a perspective in
which the play as a whole can be viewed. The undisputed hero of the day,
Caius Martius, recalls, or professes to recall, a citizen of Corioli who in
times gone by has offered him hospitality, and who has now been taken captive in
the storming of the town. He requests that his former benefactor be set at
liberty, a suit that is willingly granted by his grateful general Cominius.
When the officer charged with releasing the captive asks "Martius, his name?",
however, the unexpected reply he receives is "By Jupiter, forgot!"
(I.ix.88).[1] Things proceed no further than this, for
having stumbled upon this mysterious lacuna in his memory, Martius casually lets
the matter drop, attributing his forgetfulness to fatigue and inquiring whether
there is any wine to be had. The incident continues to reverberate in the
mind, however, if only because of its proximity to another event pivoting upon
names. This is the improvised ceremony at which Martius is invested with a
new name of his own, the agnomen Coriolanus, conferred in
recognition of the decisive role he has played in the conquest of Corioli. The
implication would seem to be that there is a symbolic connection between the
two events, that in some elusive way it is precisely because the name of the
defeated town itself has been assimilated to Martius' own that the name of
one of its inhabitants should have lost its status as such.

As various critics have remarked, such incidents as these suggest that
Coriolanus might be read as a drama about names and naming, about
who is empowered to name and on what basis, about what a name
designates, and about the relation between names and identity.[2] The play has aptly been described as "the tragic
history of a name,"[3] and it is this history that, in
some of its broader implications, I propose to examine in the course of the
following discussion. It will perhaps be agreed by many readers of this tragedy that
among the issues it explores is that of personal identity in its relation to the
various communal codes through which selfhood is fashioned and sustained,
systems of belief and value which are not necessarily mutually reinforcing or
even commensurable, and in the light of which different evaluations of the
individual's worth and conduct will be formed.[4] A
conspicuous instance of such a cultural code, one that looms into particular
prominence in this play, is the ethic of heroic individualism which Coriolanus
embodies in so trenchant a form, but there are others which are no less powerful
and with which such an ethic will inevitably come into collision. Insofar as these
different systems of value are characterized by the distinctive modes of
discourse or "languages" that articulate them, the individual's relation to such
systems might manifest itself in his attitude towards language as well --
in the way he uses language and also in the way he interprets the function of
language. The relevance of names in this context lies in the fact that it is the name
by which the individual is known that situates him within the network of
heterogeneous and only partially overlapping languages which in their totality
make up the linguistic environment of a community. To the extent that the
"meaning" of an individual's name resides in a linguistic matrix that
corresponds in some way to the complex of cultural codes through which that
individual defines himself, the "history of a name" will also be the history of
an identity.

In terms of such a perspective, the language of which names comprise a
constituent element might almost be perceived as the true medium of action
in Coriolanus, human beings themselves being frequently represented
merely as voices, in their relation to voices, or as constituted by voices.
Attention is directed towards the spoken word in the opening line of the play,
when the First Citizen delivers what amounts to
an extra-dramatic instruction to Shakespeare's audience: "Before we proceed
any further, hear me speak" (I.i.1). What we hear the citizens speak is only
one language among the several that the play presents, but it is one which
reflects with particular clarity some of those problematic aspects of language
which Shakespeare repeatedly brooded over in his drama: its relative,
provisional status, its uncertain relation to the objects of its own discourse, its
liability to demagogic excess, distortion and outright manipulation. Though
not wholly lacking in discipline or its own canons of relevance, the language
spoken by the Roman populace is characterized from the first as being
volatile, transactional, constantly subject to revaluation. One of its most
distinctive qualities is illustrated in the reply one of the citizens makes when
asked whether Martius' services to his country do not merit consideration,
that he "could be content to give him good report for't, but that he pays
himself with being proud" (I.i.31-3). This is the idiom of the market place,
unabashedly economic in spirit as well as in vocabulary, an oral currency that
participates in a complex network of exchange relationships and that
accordingly resists being anchored to fixed meanings. Even the celebrated
Fable of the Belly, the "pretty tale" with which Menenius attempts to convert
the incensed crowd to the patrician point of view in the first scene of the
play (I.i.89), proves not to be exempt from the market laws that govern all
discourse. Although Menenius is clearly of the opinion that the significance of
his tale is luminously self-evident, what becomes apparent on the contrary is
that it is susceptible to and indeed in a sense actually generated by
interpretation, that the meaning of the story is not somehow contained within
itself but externally determined by the community of listeners.

In his public pronouncements, at least, Martius evinces a conception of
language which is radically opposed to that of the market place. His willful
disregard for the practical dynamics of language use mirrors his equally
deliberate refusal to acknowledge the social mechanisms by which values,
including the values upon which his own sense of self is dependent, are
created and sustained.[5] Whereas the plebeians are
aware that meaning is contingent on viewpoint, the patrician Martius professes to
be an unshakable believer in intrinsic meanings, just as he is a staunch believer in
such absolute virtues as his own valour and integrity.[6] One of the things he most detests about the plebeians
is precisely that their language is relative, incessantly shifting, conditioned by the
mutating conditions of the moment: "With every minute you do change a mind, /
And call him noble that was now your hate" (I.i.181-2). That language is not to be
compromised or prostituted, but exacts its own inviolable standards of
integrity, is the linguistic corollary of Martius' severely aristocratic value
system. It is symptomatic of this linguistic puritanism that he should be able
to think of no more vehement phrase to express his abhorrence for the
Volscian general Aufidius than to say that "I do hate thee / Worse than a
promise-breaker" (I.viii.1-2). Keeping one's word being for him a supreme
psychological, as well as strictly ethical, imperative, he strenuously resists
the notion that words might merely be exchangeable tokens, and that they
might therefore fluctuate in value like any other currency. It is his anxiety
about the linguistic ramifications of the market ethos, his awareness that
"things created / To buy and sell with groats" (III.ii.9-10) might buy and sell
with words as well, that leads in the end to his rupture with his society. When
he falls foul of the tribunes by unambiguously speaking his mind he refuses
to salvage the situation by making even a token concession to the law of
equitable exchange, defiantly insisting instead that "I would not buy / Their
mercy at the price of one fair word" (III.iii.90-91).

At least as regards Martius' conscious motivations, then, it might appear
that James Calderwood is right in asserting that this militant insistence on the
integrity of language represents an attempt "to fashion a private language
whose words, unlike those of the plebeians, are cemented to their meanings
and incapable of distortion."[7] This is not, however,
all that there is to the matter. There is considerable evidence to suggest that what
is ultimately responsible for Martius' almost perverse inflexibility in matters
pertaining to speech is his own intuition that what language generates are, in
the final analysis, inevitably no more than relative truths, truths
that are both provisional and manipulable. Furthermore, I think it might reasonably
be argued -- though the majority of recent commentators on the play would
doubtless disagree with me -- that Martius himself participates, more than he
is prepared to admit, in precisely those linguistic practices he most
condemns. That Martius is aware of the real nature of language is indicated,
among other things, in the fact that he is himself perfectly prepared to
exploit its rhetorical potential, even if only in determinate circumstances. Although
he protests that he is constitutionally incapable of flattery, for instance, it is
difficult to imagine what more appropriate term might be applied to his
exhortation to his soldiers on the battlefield, men who belong to the detested
plebeian order and so under normal conditions would be beneath his notice
altogether:

If these shows be not outward, which of you
But is four Volsces? None of you but is
Able to bear against the great Aufidius
A shield as hard as his. (I.vi.77-80)

This invigorating specimen of rhetoric, triggered by the spectacle of the
soldiers enthusiastically casting their caps into the air (I.vi.76 SD) comes a
few scenes after that in which Martius has excoriated the Roman citizens in
the most contemptuous possible terms, deriding them among other
things for precisely the same gesture of throwing their caps into the air
(I.i.211-13). Apparently Martius believes that there is ample justification for
dissembling one's true feelings and intentions in war, that it is entirely
honourable, as his mother Volumnia puts it, "to seem / The same you are not"
(III.ii.46-7) at least as a matter of tactical policy. The principle of
dissimulation having once been admitted, however, whether in words or in
conduct, the question of where the line of demarcation is to be drawn between the
legitimate and the illegitimate use of "seeming" becomes overwhelmingly
problematic.

This contradiction between the linguistic absolutism that Martius professes
and the pragmatic manipulation of language to which he often resorts in
practical affairs appears elsewhere as well. Commentators on the play,
evidently acquiescing in its protagonist's monolithic conception of his own
character, have not on the whole taken adequate account of his posturing,
the histrionic dimension to much of his conduct, his tendency to play
roles,[8] and have consequently minimized or
overlooked altogether the element of ambiguity and even of insincerity in his
character. Ironically, it is the supposedly benighted citizens of Rome who are able
to penetrate his mask and perceive not only that he is desperately avid for
celebrity but that in his all-consuming dedication to fame he is guilty of
unconscious duplicity:

I say unto you, what he hath done famously, he did it to
that end: though soft-conscienced men can be content to
say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother,
and to be partly proud, which he is, even to the altitude of
his virtue. (I.i.35-9)

Martius' much-vaunted patriotism is subservient to, or at least closely allied
with, his impulse to self-aggrandizement, his craving to have his exploits
extolled publicly. While he may not indulge in the comparatively naive kind of
"narrative self-fashioning" that Stephen Greenblatt ascribes to
Othello,[9] he does seem to be continually striving to
induce others to enshrine his exploits in the elevated language of epic favoured by
such exponents of patrician values as Cominius. Volumnia reminds her son
at one point that "My praises made thee first a soldier" (III.ii.108), and
whatever Martius says or believes about the matter, it is on praise that he
continues to subsist.[10] Although Martius frequently
proclaims his aversion to being made the object of what he terms "acclamations
hyperbolical" (I.ix.50), he invariably does so in circumstances in which, as he
cannot fail to be aware, his remonstrations will go unheeded, in which they
will avail not to stifle praise but to magnify it. Such affectation is not
incidental to his character, for as the prominent strain of theatrical imagery in the
play suggests, Martius is constantly playing to an audience, always on stage in
one form or another, until the moment of reckoning at last comes in which
"Like a dull actor now / I have forgot my part and I am out, / Even to a full
disgrace" (V.iii.40-2). And the primary function that this role-playing
discharges is of course that it also imposes roles on others, obliging them to
say of Martius what he wants to hear, to transform his life into heroic
narrative, to immortalize his deeds and character in that "good report" which
Volumnia says would have served as a satisfactory substitute for her son
even in the event that he had died in battle (I.iii.20-21). Menenius displays
considerable insight into the covert motivations of his friend when, seeking to
confer with him in the Volscian camp towards the end of the play, he bases
his claim to consideration on the fact that he has been "The book of his good
acts whence men have read / His fame unparallel'd, haply amplified" (V.ii.15-
16). The name of Martius' mother, Volumnia, may be assimilable
to the same pattern of imagery.

It is in the light of Martius' eagerness to have his deeds and virtues
commemorated in words that we should read such scenes as
that following the capture of Corioli in which
the hero is invested with his new name. What has perhaps been insufficiently
emphasized by critics examining this episode is the pertinacity with which
Martius contrives, through irritable disclaimers and patently insincere
exhibitions of modesty, to keep the limelight focused uninterruptedly on
himself, notwithstanding the fact that there are presumably more pressing
matters to attend to in the wake of a major battle than the awarding of palms.
Cominius gives credit where credit is due by telling Martius that an
exhaustive narration of his exploits would strain even his own capacity for
belief -- "If I should tell thee o'er this thy day's work, / Thou't not
believe thy deeds" (I.ix.1-2) -- and assuring him that a suitably glowing report will
be delivered in the appropriate quarter. When Lartius adds his tribute to that of
his general, however, Martius suddenly begins to disparage his own
performance, declaring that he has done no more than what his sense of duty
has required of him. As occurs elsewhere in the play, the effect of this ritual
of self-deprecation is not to stem the flow of praise but positively to
oblige the others to intensify their efforts to render the honour that is due. Lest
Martius suspect him of trying to buy him off with a handful of compliments,
Cominius assures him that there is no question of attempting to discharge a debt,
that the public proclamation of Martius' value performs a symbolic rather than a
compensatory function:

`Twere a concealment
Worse than a theft, no less than a traducement,
To hide your doings, and to silence that,
Which, to the spire and top of praises vouch'd,
Would seem but modest. Therefore I beseech you --
In sign of what you are, not to reward
What you have done -- before our army hear me. (I.ix.21-7)

But Martius continues to demur, saying that "I have some wounds upon me,
and they smart / To hear themselves remember'd" (I.ix.28-29). Possibly
growing somewhat impatient at Martius' obstinacy, his stubborn refusal to let
the matter of his merit be decently settled and dismissed, Cominius proposes
more tangible tokens of appreciation:

Of all the horses --
Whereof we have ta'en good, and good store -- of all
The treasure in this field achiev'd and city,
We render you the tenth (I.ix.31-4)

Such an offer would almost constitute an affront to Martius, since what it
amounts to is a tacit attempt to quantify his merit, to measure it according to
the criteria of the market place. Martius has already expressed the most
scathing contempt for those soldiers who, looting the city, "prize their
hours / At a crack'd drachma" (I.v.4-5), and he now declines Cominius' offer on
the grounds that he "cannot make my heart consent to take / A bribe to pay my
sword" (I.ix.37-8). It is at this point that Cominius offers Martius the only
recompense he is likely to accept, the formal recognition of absolute
rather than relative value, a public acknowledgment that Martius has not only
made a valuable contribution to the success of the day but has
converted that success into an exclusively personal triumph. This
acknowledgment takes the form of the supreme trophy of the name by which
Martius is consecrated as hero of his people and indelibly inscribed in the
language of his country:

Therefore be it known,
As to us, to all the world, that Caius Martius
Wears this war's garland: in token of the which,
My noble steed, known to the camp, I give him,
With all his trim belonging; and from this time,
For what he did before Corioli, call him,
With all th'applause and clamour of the host,
Martius Caius Coriolanus! (I.ix.57-64)

Martius not only does not refuse this name, conferred amid accolades of
precisely the sort he claims to detest, but totally appropriates it as his
own in words which hint at a ceremony of self-baptism:

I will go wash;
And when my face is fair, you shall perceive
Whether I blush or no: howbeit, I thank you.
I mean to stride your steed, and at all times
To undercrest your good addition,
To th'fairness of my power." (I.iv.66-71)

It is immediately after this, when attention is deflected from himself
towards the more urgent business of negotiating with the defeated Volscians,
that Coriolanus once again thrusts himself to the center of the stage by
recollecting the old citizen of Corioli whom, in a fine display of soldierly
magnanimity, he petitions to be released, but whose name he has so
inexplicably forgotten.

If Martius' tendency to monopolize the limelight already betrays the
essential hollowness of his pretensions to lofty self-sufficiency, there are
overtones to the foregoing scene that are even more ironic in potential, even
more at odds with the absolutist aristocratic ethic professed by both Martius
and Cominius. For although what Martius and Cominius are ostensibly talking
about is the attribution of honour in recognition of an order of merit that
transcends considerations of mere price, they are also, in a certain sense,
though perhaps unbeknownst to themselves, engaged in a subtle process of
bartering. While Cominius augments his offer by successive increments,
Martius persists in holding out for more, until at last a price is arrived
at that Martius does consider commensurate with his dignity, the price of one fair
word. Martius too, in other words, is in his own way playing by the rules
of the market place, negotiating so that the maximum amount of glory will accrue
to himself. It is the fact that such tacit bargaining does occur even in patrician
circles that gives ironic point to the scene in which Menenius and Volumnia
compile an inventory of Martius' wounds and eagerly compute their number,
arriving by meticulous calculation at a figure of twenty-seven (II.i.144-55).
Martius affects to regard his wounds as the purely private tokens of honour,
and will not demean himself before the Roman populace so far as to "Show
them th'unaching scars which I should hide, / As if I had receiv'd them for the
hire / Of their breath only!" (II.ii.148-50). The fact that the nature and number
of his scars is a matter of public knowledge, however, suggests that they
have become, to all intents and purposes, negotiable units of value on the
patrician honour market.[11] And since Martius'
acquisition of honour -- and of the name which is the linguistic embodiment of that
honour -- does after all have more than a little in common with a market
transaction, it is ironically appropriate that when one of his admirers remarks that
"there's wondrous things spoke of him," Menenius should reply "Wondrous! Ay, I
warrant you, and not without his true purchasing" (II.i.136-8).

Coriolanus' tragedy, if tragedy it can be called, proceeds from a category
confusion, a failure (or refusal) to discriminate between dimensions of value
or, more accurately, to openly acknowledge what his own behavior confirms:
that all value is in the final analysis relative and therefore subject to
negotiation. The crux of the problem appears in Volumnia's account of her
motives for instilling the desire for achievement into Martius, "considering
how honour would become such a person -- that it was no better than
picture-like to hang by the wall, if renown made it not stir" (I.iii.10-12). Whereas
Volumnia draws a pragmatic distinction between honour and fame, however,
Coriolanus is convinced that there exists a necessary correlation between
the two.[12] If honour is essentially a private matter,
or at least for most ordinary purposes can be equated with self-esteem, fame is
necessarily public, and depends upon the estimation of others. Coriolanus
however believes, or believes he believes, that fame and honour are merely
different aspects of the same thing, that public recognition is necessarily due
to one who has amassed a sufficient amount of honour, and that the
individual's honour increases in direct proportion to his renown. As long as
he is dealing solely with members of his own class no incompatibility
emerges between the concepts of honour and renown, because in the
patrician world the criteria according to which these are determined are
essentially identical. It is when he is compelled to descend into the
market place, and thereby make explicit what has already been implicit in his
bargaining session with Cominius, that a fatal contradiction arises.

This contradiction is dramatized once again in terms of the linguistic
metaphor which constitutes a dominant leitmotif in the play and, more
specifically, of contrasting conceptions of the status and authority of names.
Martius has been invested with a new name at Corioli, and credited in
Cominius' dispatches to Rome with "the whole name of the war" (II.i.133-4).
When he returns to Rome a herald proclaims that he "hath won, / With fame,
a name to Martius Caius" (II.i.162-3), and Volumnia reinforces the
association between name and fame when she greets her son with the
salutation "By deed-achieving honour newly nam'd -- / What is it? --
Coriolanus, must I call thee?" (II.i.172-3). At first no complications
arise for the simple reason that the entire city is united in its admiration for the
newly-returned hero, that "All tongues speak of him" with equal adulation
(II.i.203). To the profound dismay of the tribunes, who fear that his growing
ascendancy might pose a threat to their own prerogatives, Coriolanus' name
has become a household word. But it is precisely because a name is
only a word, and therefore subject in the final analysis to the forces that
govern all language, that Coriolanus is destined to a downfall.

The critical test comes when Coriolanus is obliged to present himself
before the common people in order to obtain their ratification for the decision
of the Senate to bestow upon him the office of consul. In view of his
popularity, no one anticipates any difficulty in Coriolanus' securing the
necessary endorsement, provided that he plays by the rules
prescribed by custom. As one of the citizens says:

... if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are
to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them.
So if he tell us his noble deeds, we must also tell him our
noble acceptance of them. (II.iii.5-9)

The language here is transactional: if Coriolanus does one thing, the citizens
will reciprocate by doing something in return. At least in form, this is
the logic of the market place, the law of quid pro quo, expressed not only
in linguistic but in explicitly lingual terms. But Coriolanus has a conception of
language which is very far from transactional, and is consequently, as North's
Plutarch says of him, "altogether unfit for any mans conversation."[13] When he presents himself before the
commoners he fulfills the tribunes' prediction that he "will require them /
As if he did contemn what he requested / Should be in them to give" (II.ii.156-8).
Actually confronted by members of the plebeian class, he discovers that "I
cannot bring / My tongue to such a pace" (II.iii.52-3) as to formulate the
humble request that is expected of him, and provokingly announces that it is
"Mine own desert" (II.iii.66) that brings him before them. He repeatedly and
offensively identifies the plebeians exclusively with their voices, having
maliciously taken his cue from the tribunes' insistence that "the people / Must
have their voices" (II.ii.139-40), and pointedly mocks the logic of the market
place at the same time that he travesties the conventions of courteous
speech:

Coriolanus: Well then, I pray, your price
o'th'consulship?First Citizen: The price is, to ask it kindly.Coriolanus: Kindly, sir, I pray let me ha't. I have
wounds to show you, which shall be yours in private. Your
good voice, sir. What say you? (II.iii.74-8)

By failing to comply with all the requirements of the ceremony, refusing to
display his wounds on the grounds that it would seem "As if I had receiv'd
them for the hire / Of their breath only!" (II.ii.149-59), Coriolanus is denying
the plebeians access to what they themselves have obliquely described as
"mouths" through which they would willingly have voiced a favourable opinion
of his worthiness.

This scene brings to a sharp focus the fundamental contradiction in
Coriolanus' view of things, a contradiction that permeates his conception of
identity, his notion of what it is to be a man, as well as his attitude towards
language. The paradox latent in his position is, as I have already suggested,
that the codes through which he seeks to define himself in isolation from his
community are themselves derived from that community, that even the image
he projects of heroic self-sufficiency is constructed in relation to a social
context in the absence of which it would be empty of significance. The fact
that Martius presents himself as a candidate for the consulship at all, that he
pursues a public office together with a title that confers social definition,
indicates that he wishes to situate himself within the institutional
framework of his city, to establish (or elaborate) his identity in terms of an
antecedent system of cultural conventions. On this occasion as well, as D. J.
Gordon points out, "in seeking the voices Coriolanus is a subject looking for his
name,"[14] aspiring to yet another "addition" to
complement that acquired at Corioli. As is also the case in the scene in
which he receives his agnomen, however, Martius is playing by the rules of
the game only up to a certain point. What he is actually striving to do once
again is negotiate a title for himself without committing himself to the
broader implications of the process in which he is engaged, to enhance his personal
status through the acquisition of a name without acknowledging that all
names depend for their meaning upon a public consensus. When Martius
mocks the voices and tongues of the citizens whose votes he is soliciting, in
other words, he is placing himself in a position that might be described as
one of linguistic inauthenticity, since he wants to be "nam'd for consul"
(III.i.194) by the very people whose authority to name he emphatically
denies.

Although they initially consent to Martius' nomination as consul, the
plebeians are aware of the derision with which they have been treated, and
the tribunes adduce this as grounds to arraign their enemy publicly. What is
dramatized in the course of the ensuing scenes is, among other things, a
contest between rival conceptions of language, a specifically linguistic
exemplification of the phenomenon that in more general sociological terms
has been referred to as "legitimation crisis."[15]
When the tribunes announce that the people have withdrawn their authorization,
Coriolanus criticizes their want of linguistic responsibility -- "Have I had
children's voices?" (III.i.29) -- and follows this up by challenging their
right to speak at all: "Must these have voices, that can yield them now / And
straight disclaim their tongues?" (III.i.33-4). Language being for Coriolanus a
medium of self-definition, it cannot be compromised as the plebeians have
done without compromising the self as well. For his own part, when one of the
tribunes charges him with having spoken against the distribution of grain to
the poor he defiantly stands by his words even though in so doing he is
knowingly committing political suicide: "This was my speech, and I will
speak't again" (III.i.61). It is perhaps significant that the issue of the
grain, introduced in the opening scene of the play, should present itself again at
this critical juncture, because what Coriolanus is in a certain sense doing at
this point is claiming a monopoly over words analogous to that which the
patricians have been exercising over the food supply.[16] His conception of language as a "servant of
essences he alone can recognize because he alone embodies them," to borrow
Stanley Fish's useful phrase,[17] precludes the
possibility of conciliation or even of genuine communication, because it effectively
denies the collective authority of the community to legislate meaning according to
its own conventions. In one of Coriolanus' more impassioned outbursts, references
to wounds as the index of personal honour, to coinage, and to words coalesce in a
revealing association of ideas:

As for my country I have shed my blood,
Not fearing outward force, so shall my lungs
Coin words till their decay ... (III.i.75-7)

If Martius seems on this occasion to be invoking the conception of words as
currency -- the transactional view -- it is only because he is simultaneously
claiming for himself the exclusive authority, by virtue of the wounds he has
sustained in the service of Rome, to mint that currency. His linguistic
despotism becomes increasingly blatant as he urges the patricians to "pluck
out / The multitudinous tongue" (III.i.154-5) by abolishing the office of tribune,
thus occasioning dismay even among his closest allies. It is at this point that
the true basis of linguistic authority, which for better or for worse can only be
vested in the community itself, begins to reassert itself as one of the tribunes
summons the people "in whose name myself / Attach thee as a traitorous
innovator / A foe to the public weal" (III.i.172-4).

It is perhaps worth reiterating that there is nothing
homogeneous or compact about the "community" that Martius is defying at
this point, just as there is nothing homogeneous or compact about the
patrician class he represents. It is made perfectly clear in the play that the
tribunes are not simply voicing the will of the Roman populace in whose
name they profess to be acting, but are seeking to promote their own
particular interests in accordance with canons of Realpolitik which
represent one possible, but no more than one possible, conception of rational
social conduct. The patricians, similarly, though they formally subscribe to
the same absolute values that Martius defends, are prepared in practice to
compromise their principles in order to safeguard their privileges. Menenius
in particular, though he fully shares Martius' elitist convictions, is also aware
that language is transactional by its very nature, and cannot with impunity be
deployed merely as a private instrument. He advocates "Only fair speech"
(III.ii.96) as the sole means by which Martius might yet extricate himself from
his predicament, and is seconded in this counsel by Volumnia herself, who
points out that in the present emergency her son might honourably resort to
the policy of dissembling he has employed to such good effect in warfare.
Despite his unabated repugnance -- "Must I / With my base tongue give to
my noble heart / A lie that it must bear?" (III.ii.99-101) -- Coriolanus does in
the end yield to pressure, promising his mother to descend into the market
place and to "return consul, / Or never trust to what my tongue can do /
I'th'way of flattery further" (III.ii.135-7). It is ironic that in the trial which follows
Martius, for whom keeping one's word is a supreme imperative, and who
hates promise-breakers only to a slightly lesser degree than he hates
Aufidius, should perjure himself by failing to honour that undertaking.
Provoked by the tribunes, he repeats his error of disregarding the
transactional character of language, defying his adversaries with the
statement "I would not buy / Their mercy at the price of one fair word"
(III.iii.90-91). He is therefore banished "in the name o'th'people" (III.iii.99),
and his retaliatory gesture of banishing Rome in his turn (III.iii.123), through
the logical culmination of his attempt to usurp the language and judicial
procedures of the city for his own purposes, is self-evidently bankrupt as a
response.

Martius has been evicted not only from a physical community but from an
environing social order in terms of whose conventions he has, while affecting
to scorn them, established his own sense of self. When he is subsequently
seen in Antium he is shorn of identity, "disguised and muffled" as a scene
direction informs us, and his subsequent actions might be understood as
attempts to recover what has been forfeited. He presents himself before
Aufidius confidently expecting to be recognized but, notwithstanding the
broad hints with which he attempts to elicit his own name from his enemy, he is
obliged in the end to pronounce it himself. It is tempting to suspect the
presence of a parodic undercurrent to this scene, a kind of travesty of
Martius' own epic conception of himself, as the literary convention of the
disguised hero's unmasking himself to the infinite confusion of his enemies
degenerates into something bordering on bathos:

"Only that name remains" (IV.v.74), he complains a moment later, apparently
forgetting that this name can hardly have the meaning for the Volscians that it
has for himself, since its significance depends upon conventions specific to
the community from which he has been exiled. Although Aufidius, who has
evidently already determined to exploit Martius' vulnerabilities for his own
purposes, refrains for the moment from pointing out the inappropriateness of
Martius' invocation of his agnomen in the present circumstances, the
issue will assume crucial importance in the final scene of the play.

Aufidius, explicitly aware of the relativity of value as Martius is not,
knows that in the final analysis it is a function of a public consensus and
therefore inevitably subject to the shifting circumstances of the moment. As
he later says:

So our virtues
Lie in th'interpretation of the time,
And power, unto itself most commendable,
Hath not a tomb so evident as a chair
T'extol what it hath done.
One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail;
Rights by rights falter, strengths by strengths do fail. (IV.vii.49-55)

This perception gives him an immense advantage over Coriolanus, who
continues to adhere to the doctrine of absolute value that his own behavior
has exposed as specious. With a view to securing his own advantage,
Aufidius astutely supplies Martius with exactly what he most craves at this
moment, the exterior tokens of boundless admiration, the prospect of
reconstituting himself in the esteem of his former foes, "fair words" in
abundance:

I lov'd the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold. Why, thou Mars! (IV.v.115-19)

It is symptomatic of the torpor into which his critical faculties have lapsed that
Martius fails to perceive the glaring insincerity of such remarks as this,
or finds anything in the least suspicious in Aufidius' subsequent asseveration
that the Volscians would attack Rome "Had we no quarrel else to Rome, but
that / Thou art thence banish'd" (IV.v.128-9). The individual who has scorned
flattery in any form now becomes hopelessly entangled in its toils, incapable
of discriminating between a candid expression of esteem and calculated
deception. The irony of this situation becomes almost comically manifest in a
servant's report on the scene in which Coriolanus is introduced to other
Volscian worthies:

Why, he is so made on here within as if he were son and
heir to Mars; set at upper end o'th'table; no question asked
him by any of the senators but they stand bald before him.
Our general himself makes a mistress of him, sanctifies
himself with's hand, and turns up the white o' th'eye to his
discourse. (IV.v.196-202)

The project that Martius conceives at the instigation of Aufidius to unleash
a Volscian army upon Rome in order to wreak exemplary vengeance
effectively belies, though he does not know it, the parting words with which
he has turned his back on his countrymen: "There is a world elsewhere!"
(III.iii.135). His thoughts continue to gravitate obsessively towards Rome,
because it is Rome which is the origin and ground of everything he has been
and stood for, which continues to embody the authority of community even
when he is permitted no option but to define himself in a negative relation to
that community. Notwithstanding his new formal allegiance, therefore, he
remains essentially bereft of personal coordinates, resembling less a human
being than a mechanical colossus devoid of conscience or sentiment, "a
thing / Made by some other deity than nature" (IV.vi.91-2). It is Cominius,
who after the events at Corioli is uniquely in a position to appreciate the
importance that names have for Martius, who comes nearest to
comprehending that what the renegade is afflicted with is
a tormenting loss of identity, and that his unspoken objective in
marching on Rome is nothing other than to fabricate a new name for himself:

"Coriolanus"
He would not answer to; forbad all names:
He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
Till he had forg'd himself a name o'th'fire
Of burning Rome. (V.i.11-15)

In terms of the premises of the play, such a design might seem to possess a
certain grim logic. But as Menenius discovers to his chagrin when he visits
Martius in the Volscian camp, and is at first rebuffed by the sentinels
with the comment "the virtue of your name / Is not here passable" (V.ii.12-13),
names have meaning only within the context of a specific linguistic community. For
this reason Coriolanus' project is ultimately self-defeating, because the
name he intends to forge for himself in the fire of burning Rome is to be
acquired through the complete annihilation of the only linguistic community
that, in the view of a Roman such as himself, can underwrite names and
endow them with significance.

The contradictions latent in Martius' stance with respect both to his own
name and to the identity which that name designates become manifest when
his family visits him in an effort to intercede on behalf of Rome.
Notwithstanding Martius' declaration of his intention to act "As if a man were
author of himself / And knew no other kin" (V.iii.36-7), Volumnia and Virgilia
make an initial attempt to reclaim Martius for their community on the grounds
of personal affiliation, contesting in effect his radically simplified conception
of what a name consists in, his exclusive identification of it with individual
renown. If Coriolanus' agnomen is a purely personal token of honour,
his nomen Martius designates the clan to which he belongs, the "noble
house o'th'Martians" of whose history, as even the tribunes obliquely
acknowledge, any scion might legitimately be proud (II.iii.236-43). When
Volumnia describes Martius' son, who has inherited his name, as "a poor
epitome of yours, / Which by th'interpretation of full time / May show like all
yourself" (V.iii.68-70), she is invoking another possible basis for identity than
that which is to be located in a personal reputation alone. She is also, in a certain
sense, unwittingly supplying her own commentary on Aufidius' remark that
"our virtues / Lie in th'interpretation of the time" (IV.vii.49-50), since the
"interpretation of full time" through which a child arrives at maturity
belongs to a realm of human experience unaffected by the provisional status of
reputation. Martius' wife Virgilia reiterates this idea when she tells her
husband that she has "brought you forth this boy, to keep your name / Living
to time" (V.iii.126-7).[18] What is being suggested --
or what at least might reasonably be inferred -- is that the only kind of immortality
to which the individual can attain is to be found not in the endless
reverberations of undying fame but in what Shakespeare refers to in the
sonnets as "increase,"[19] and that the perpetuation
of the self achieved through such means affords access to a domain of value which,
though certainly not absolute, is perhaps not entirely arbitrary either.

From the point of view of the personal tragedy depicted in this play,
however, what is chiefly significant about this phase in the conference is that
Martius does not draw such an inference, or at least does not allow himself to
be swayed by it. He tries instead to terminate the discussion, and it is at
this point that Volumnia changes verbal tactics, this time shrewdly striking her
son where he is most vulnerable. If the concept of "name" has been briefly
associated with familial self-perpetuation in her abortive appeal to Martius'
paternal sentiments, it is once again firmly coupled to fame in her subsequent
remarks, though in the unexpectedly negative sense this time of notoriety.
For the first time it is given Martius very clearly to understand that a famous
name might be the token not of honour but of its precise opposite:

... if thou conquer Rome, the benefit
Which thou shalt thereby reap is such a name,
Whose repetition will be dogg'd with curses,
Whose chronicle thus writ: "The man was noble,
But with his last attempt he wip'd it out,
Destroy'd his country, and his name remains
To th'insuing age abhorr'd." (V.iii.142-8)

Volumnia goes even further, and warns that she herself might become the
mouthpiece through which this unenviable chronicle finds utterance. This
occurs at the climax of the impressive sequence of rhetorical variations on
the theme of speaking in which, in a devastating crescendo, she ranges over
the entire spectrum of human and social obligations that Martius is violating
and then, unsure of the effect her words are having, pronounces what amounts
to a threat of anathema:

Yet give us our dispatch:
I am husht until our city be afire,
And then I'll speak a little. (V.iii.180-82)

The idea that his own mother, who more than any other person has been
responsible for inculcating his insatiable craving for a name, might
be moved by allegiance to her city to render that name synonymous with
betrayal, is intolerable to Martius. For the first time he is compelled to
recognize what has always been the case: that his reputation, his name, and
hence in the final analysis his very identity, are not in his own hands,
that he does not possess an exclusive monopoly on language, that neither in the
literal nor the figurative sense can any man be author of himself. In
capitulating to his mother at this point he is tacitly deferring to the
authority of the community in whose codes he is inscribed, and it is dramatically
very appropriate that he should be -- as the eloquent scene direction "Holds her
by the hand silent" intimates (V.iii.183) -- left quite literally without words.

While what occurs subsequently might appear to be more in the nature of
an epilogue than anything else, there is a certain ambiguity attaching to the
conclusion of the play that hints at the possibility of an obscure redemption
for Martius and even of a partial vindication of the essentialism he has
defended so tenaciously. Aufidius, who is himself chafing under the ignominy
of being, as Cominius describes him, merely "The second name of men"
(IV.vi.126), and who is seeking a pretext to eliminate his old enemy once and
for all, publicly impugns the name of which Martius is so proud: "Dost thou
think / I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name / Coriolanus, in
Corioles?" (V.vi.88-90). Not only does he despoil him of his name, but he
even denies his right to name, adjuring him to "Name not the god, thou boy of
tears!" when Martius apostrophizes Mars (V.vi.101). Since it is the name of
this deity that inspires that by which Martius is familiarly addressed, what
Aufidius is contesting in effect is his entitlement even to invoke his own
nomen.[20] Angrily asserting his undiminished
preeminence in the face of this relentless expropriation of the names in which
his sense of self is vested, Martius confronts his enemies with the chronicle
of one of the greatest exploits of his career, which is also as it happens the
chronicle of one of the Volscians' most humiliating defeats: "If you have writ
your annals true, 'tis there, / That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter'd
your Volscians in Corioli" (V.vi.113-15). But Martius' heroism, like everything
else about him, lies in the interpretation of the time, and it is this final effort to
affirm his identity through an appeal to the epic quality of his personal story
that supplies Aufidius with the justification he needs for killing him.

This death can be construed in different ways: as a kind of coup de
grace delivered to a man who has already demonstrated the inauthenticity
and ultimate bankruptcy of his notions of value and meaning and selfhood, or
as a supreme gesture of personal affirmation on the part of a genuinely
exceptionable individual who immolates himself willingly on the altar of his
own heroic conception of life. I have been arguing that Coriolanus
can be read as a play about the paradox inherent in the concept of personal
identity, and that it raises questions concerning the status of selfhood in a world
in which all definitions of selfhood are socially given. But perhaps it should
also be pointed out that if the contradictions latent in Martius' ideal
conception of himself are exposed with relentless clarity in the course of the
play, there is no alternative viewpoint -- neither that of the patricians
or the tribunes or the Roman populace -- that receives the tacit endorsement of
unambiguously sympathetic treatment.[21] It is true
that the sheer single mindedness of Martius' quest for absolute meaning has severed
him from the only possible ground of meaning, leaving him without a name
and without an identity in the end. But it is no less true that, with the expulsion
of Martius and what he stands for, Rome has disintegrated into a babel of quarreling
factions. The dialect of the marketplace now appears as the travesty of itself,
with Menenius assuring the citizenry that Martius will "pay you for your voices"
with wholesale destruction (IV.vi.137), and one of the tribunes, referring to the report
that Martius has joined forces with Aufidius, expressing the wish that "half
my wealth / Would buy this for a lie!" (IV.vi.160-1).
And if Rome does in the end achieve a precarious unity which
is signaled in the communal festivities surrounding Volumnia's triumphal
return after her final conference with her son, it must not be forgotten that this
unity is the direct consequence of a decision that Coriolanus has taken, one
for which he personally assumes full responsibility. Whatever his defects,
and they are without question monumental defects, it is arguable that
even amid the ruins of his ambition Martius remains the noblest Roman of
them all.

Because the ambiguity surrounding Martius' life attends its termination as
well, both possible views of the significance that is to be attributed to the
circumstances of his death may be equally valid. Coriolanus is the
tragedy of a man who, in the name of a realm of absolute value he believes
to be worthily exemplified only by himself, seeks first to manipulate the
conventions by which selfhood is socially constituted, and then, when those
conventions prove intractable to his efforts at total appropriation, resolves to
dispense with them altogether. He begins by inciting others to become "The
book of his good acts whence men have read / His fame unparallel'd, haply
amplified" (V.ii.14-16), and arrives at the point of proclaiming, in a pun that is
no less suggestive for being involuntary, his intention to act "As if a man
were author of himself" (V.iii.36). The posthumous destiny that awaits him is that
anticipated, once again in narratological terms, in the words of the
conspirator who urges Aufidius to kill him before he can address the
Volscians, so that "When he lies along, / After your way his tale pronounc'd
shall bury / His reasons with his body" (V.v.57-9). The final irony of the play
may be that the man who has lived his life as his own epic narrative is fated
at the last to be absorbed into the narrative of another, to survive even in
memory only as an interpretation of the tale he has not been granted
sufficient time to relate. Or the final irony may be of another kind altogether,
consisting in the possibility that Aufidius will honour his solemn undertaking
that his victim "shall have a noble memory" (V.vi.153), that Martius will
therefore achieve in the end precisely what he desired to the exclusion of all
other imperatives, and that the man who has lived for a name and died for a name
will after all go down in history by that name.